The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (14 page)

“It’s cancerous,” the surgeon said. “It’s a malignant carcinoma.”

Mike buried his head in his hands and heaved with sobs as Abby threw her arms around him, as if to keep him from flying to pieces. Mam and Paw collapsed into tears. Trembling, Paw looked with desperation around the room, as if looking for cover. Mam thought,
My God, I’ve got to call Rod.

Julie and I knew Ruthie was having exploratory surgery that morning and had been up for hours, praying and worrying. At half past nine my iPhone rang. The screen told me it was Mam. Julie and I hustled into the bathroom, where our children couldn’t see our reaction, in case the news was bad. I answered the call.

“Baby, it’s cancer!” Mam shrieked. “It’s cancer! It’s malignant. Sister has lung cancer.”

My stomach tightened.
This is really happening,
I thought.

To us.

To our family.

Julie, who could hear Mam’s frantic voice through the phone, gasped and threw her arms around me. I steadied myself against the sink, swallowed hard, and told my mother I would be on the next flight I could book.

“Mama, don’t worry,” I said. “God will take care of us.”

I ended the call, held my wife, and with my head buried in the crook of her neck, felt hot tears pour down my cheeks.

“We have to tell the kids,” she said.

Our children—Matthew, Lucas, and Nora—knew that Aunt Ruthie was going in for an operation to figure out why she had been coughing so much. They did not know what this meant. They had never dealt with serious illness in a close family member. We dreaded breaking this news to them.

At eleven, Matthew was the one we were least worried about. Wry and unusually mature, Matthew was already adept at using ironic humor to distance himself from strong emotion. Four-year-old Nora—named for the high school teacher who helped me leave St. Francisville—was too young to appreciate the gravity of this news.

But Lucas? The news would tear him to bits. Blond, athletic, and buoyant, Lucas, age six, was easily the most spirited of our children—and by far the most emotional. He was especially close to Aunt Ruthie, who saw a lot of herself in him. She adored Lucas’s sweet nature, his
eagerness to be outdoors, and, despite his physical toughness, the way he would tear up over sentimental things. From the time he was four Lucas cherished waking up early on visits to Mam and Paw’s, putting on his shoes, and running over to the Leming house. Sometimes he would crawl into the bed and snuggle with his aunt, who doted on him and gave that sweet baby Pop-Tarts even though his daddy said he couldn’t have them.

And now we had to tell him that Aunt Ruthie was very sick and might die.

Julie and I gathered the children around the Jesus icon on the mantel. It was where we said our bedtime prayers. The night before we had prayed as a family for Aunt Ruthie’s peace, and for God to guide the hands of the surgeons the next morning. Now we would pray for her again.

We sat together on the edge of the coffee table, with the children standing in front of us. They were visibly nervous, eyes wide and mouths tight.

“Kids, we have some bad news,” I said. “Aunt Ruthie has cancer. It’s a bad disease. She’s really sick.”

They stood stock-still.

Lucas was the first to speak, saying in a tiny voice, as if he were peeking out from under a blanket, “Is she going to die?”

“She might, baby,” I said. “The doctors are going to do all they can, and we’re going to pray for her. But she might.”

His fists shot up to his eyes, pressing them hard and rubbing vigorously. The harder he dug and twisted, the more wild tears soaked his cheeks and hands. It looked like he was juicing a lemon.

Nora and Matthew, their faces blotchy and distressed, stepped by instinct toward me. Julie swept them and Lucas into my embrace. We collapsed into each other and cried for Ruthie, for Mike, for the girls, and for ourselves. After a minute of this, I stood and asked everyone to face the icon. We crossed ourselves and prayed for Ruthie.

I told the children I would have to go later that day down to Louisiana to be with Aunt Ruthie. Lucas ran to his room and threw himself facedown on his bed. He pulled his pillow down tight over his head and tried to hide from the worst day of his life.

I phoned my manager at the John Templeton Foundation, told him the news, and said I needed to go. I had been an employee there for exactly six weeks.

“Take as much time as you need,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. We’re thinking of you and praying for you all.”

In those days I wrote a blog for the faith and culture site
Beliefnet.com
. Because of the intimate rapport I had developed with my readers, I felt that I could tell them what was happening with my sister, and to allude to a sadness I felt about a piece of unfinished business that lingered between us.

Since that “good country cook” remark over the uneaten bouillabaisse over a decade earlier, Ruthie had found more than a few occasions to sink a similar claw into me on visits back home. By then it was undeniable that Ruthie harbored anger at me, even though most of the time we got along well. It would usually come out in arguments over food, or the different ways we raised our children. Ruthie plainly loved me, but she just as plainly thought that I was a snob and a fraud.

I knew this was how she felt, but I also did not know how to address it. Like our father Ruthie was not one to let facts or contradictory opinions get in the way of emotional truths she had settled on. That was her nature. And it was my nature to investigate, to dissect, to analyze. Ruthie did not want to talk about it. Had I been living in Louisiana, we would have had to talk about it, because the tension was hard to bear. But I wasn’t living in Louisiana; I only visited for a few days each year. Why stir up trouble? We could work it out someday.

On our last Christmas visit home to Louisiana before we moved to Philly, Ruthie made an offhand remark about me at the dinner table that cut me deeply. As we gathered at the table to pray before Sunday
dinner, Ruthie said, “Rod, why don’t you say the blessing, since you’re so holier-than-thou.”

I held my tongue, but was furious. Still seething after the meal I told Paw privately I was fed up with Ruthie’s behavior toward me.

“What is her problem with me anyway?” I asked him.

He looked hurt. “I don’t know, son. There’s something there, but I don’t know what it is.” She later told him that she had mistaken the spiteful phrase “holier-than-thou,” which means “religiously self-righteous,” for the benign term “prayerful.” I wasn’t convinced.

This episode was on my mind as I waited for the car to arrive to take me to the airport. I just had time to post this message on my blog:

Folks, my presence on this blog will be light in the days to come. I’ve just received terrible news of a critical family medical emergency, and will be getting on a plane for Louisiana this afternoon. I’m not at liberty to share details right now, out of privacy concerns, but I do beg your prayers for us. I will share more information as I am able.

To be sure, I’m not at odds with my stricken family member, but let me beg something else of you: right now, on this very day, ask forgiveness of those you’ve offended, and offer it to those who have offended you. Be reconciled, if you can. Don’t live as if you have all the time in the world, because you don’t. None of us do.

Change your life. Repent. Love. It’s urgent. You have no idea how urgent until you get a phone call like I received this morning.

Within two hours my plane lifted off from Philadelphia, headed south.

Back at the hospital Abby snapped into crisis manager mode.

“Do you want me to call Tim?” she asked Mike. He said yes. She left the room to use her mobile phone. Mike stepped into the bathroom,
knelt down next to the toilet, and, overcome by anxiety and horror, vomited. Abby punched Tim’s number into her phone, and told him everything.

“Do you know people?” she said to him. “What do we need to do?” Tim told her he would take care of everything.

As the day wore on the waiting room filled and emptied with more friends and family. News of the diagnosis devastated each new arrival. By late morning everyone was shattered, scared, sobbing, holding each other. Fear paralyzed Mike. Paw stumbled to a private alcove down the hall to be alone. Mam joined him and prayed silently:
Why, God? She has always done the right thing. She has always been such a good girl. She has those three babies. Why her?

When Ruthie awoke from anesthesia one of her surgeons was sitting at her bedside.

“I have cancer, don’t I?” she said.

“Yes,” the doctor said. “You do.”

Then she met Dr. Miletello, a wiry, middle-aged physician with short salt-and-pepper hair and a generous smile. He would be her cancer specialist. His soft voice and tender demeanor made his manner more pastoral than clinical. For twenty-five years he had been having these bedside conversations with new cancer patients. It never was easy.

Yet Ruthie’s response to the news shocked the veteran oncologist. “She was almost like ‘thank you.’ No hostility. She was just very accepting,” he remembers.

A short time later Mike and Abby found Ruthie in the recovery room. She was alone and slightly groggy. A nurse let them know Ruthie had been told she had cancer, but Ruthie wasn’t aware that Mike and Abby knew.

“I’m sick,” she told them. “I’m really sick.”

“We know,” Abby said. “And we know you know what this is.”

“We’re going to figure this out,” Ruthie said. She was trying to help them find their footing.

Abby was full of questions. What’s the next step? What do we do now? She was trying to tame the chaos by imposing structure on it. Mike, though, sat silently next to his wife, trying to figure out what this thing was that had them in its jaws.

Mam and Paw came into Ruthie’s room, having resolved to be brave, no matter what. They saw Mike and Ruthie sitting in chairs side by side, with their heads bowed, speaking quietly to each other. Mike, lost in contemplation, did not notice them enter. Ruthie lifted her head and smiled.

Like Dr. Miletello before them, Mam and Paw were astonished by Ruthie’s reaction. This malignant tumor had destroyed their sense of order and calm, but there was their sick child, beaming. They were so frightened, but she was so brave.

The news hit the West Feliciana community like a cyclone. As the day wore on a hundred or more friends mobbed the hospital. Some offered to move in with the Lemings to care for the children while Ruthie fought this. John Bickham told Paw that he would sell everything he had to pay for Ruthie’s medical bills if it came to that. At the middle school the teachers did their best to get through the day, but kept breaking down. All over town people prepared food and took it by the Leming house, which, this being Starhill, sat unlocked.

“We were surrounded by so much love,” Mam recalls. “It was the most horrible day of our lives, but we could feel the love of all these good people. There was nothing we could have wanted or needed that wasn’t done before we asked. And they were there. Do you know what that means? People were
there
.”

The worst part of the day was over. The second-worst part—telling Ruthie and Mike’s children—was yet to come. According to the plan made before Ruthie went down for surgery, Laura and Tim were to
bring the girls down to Our Lady of the Lake to see their mother at day’s end. Earlier in the day Tim spoke to Ruthie and Mike about how they would break the news to the children. They agreed Tim would be the one to do it.

That afternoon Laura loaded the Leming girls into her SUV. They stopped by the clinic, picked up Tim, and drove south to Baton Rouge.

Mam met the girls and the Lindseys as they stepped off the elevator on Ruthie’s floor of the hospital. Mam tried to act normal, but her red eyes and puffy face gave her away. Hannah sensed that something was wrong. Tim and the children went into Ruthie’s room. Laura remained outside with Mam and Paw. The girls’ grandparents knew that in a few minutes the Leming girls’ safe, serene childhood would abruptly and cruelly end. Mam and Paw had absorbed so much already, and didn’t think they could bear to witness any more suffering that day.